THE HEART OF THE MATTER - Book review

Graham Greene’s novel The Heart of the Matter was published in 1948. It became an instant best-seller and has been reprinted many times and won awards and high praise.

In 1926 Greene was received into the Roman Catholic Church and, not surprisingly, several novels of his deal with characters bound by that faith. Major Scobie, the police chief of a flyblown West African colony during the Second World War, is one such.

Inspector Wilson is a new arrival: ‘He was like the lagging finger of the barometer, still pointing to Fair long after its companion has moved to Stormy’ (p11). Wilson shares accommodation with Harris and there’s an amusing episode where the pair start a cockroach hunt – The Cockroach Championship – to alleviate boredom (p70).

Scobie has been here for fifteen years and feels comfortably bound to the place. ‘Why, he wondered, swerving the car to avoid a dead pye-dog, do I love this place so much? Is it because here human nature hasn’t had time to disguise itself?’ (p35).

Unfortunately, his rather faded wife Louise wants to have a break, to go away on holiday. Scobie feels guilty that Louise is not happy. The bank won’t lend Scobie the money as his salary is not generous and, indeed, he has just been passed over for the post of Commissioner. In a moment of weakness, he accepts a loan from a local Syrian merchant, Yusef, who is a known black marketeer though no proof has ever been found. ‘He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation’ (p60).

While Louise is away in South Africa Scobie begins a clandestine affair with a refugee from a sunken transport ship, a young widow, Helen. He is aware he is committing the grave sin of adultery. He argues it is not a sin, it is love. And doomed.

There are several themes: guilt, sin, avarice, blackmail, deceit, love and trust. ‘Trust was a dead language of which he had forgotten the grammar’ (p264).

As the book blurb indicates, ‘inexorably, his conscience and his love of God lead him to disaster’.

There are too many examples of Greene’s prose imagery to note here, but the following are examples:

‘There was nothing to be read in the vacuous face, blank as a school notice-board out of term’ (p55).

These two, among many other insights in the book, suggest he drew upon his time as an Intelligence Officer in Freetown, British Sierra Leone:

‘The mosquitoes whirred steadily around them like sewing machines’ (p112). ‘... a mosquito immediately droned towards his ear. The skirring went on all the time, but when they drove to the attack they had the deeper drone of dive-bombers’ (p122).

‘Only the vultures were about – gathering round a dead chicken at the edge of the road, stooping their old men’s necks over the carrion, their wings like broken umbrellas sticking out this way and that’ (p230).

Editorial comment:

I’ve brought this up before; something that editors don’t spot: the tendency for writers to state a character thought to himself or herself. This really is tautological.  ‘He thought’ is adequate; ‘to himself/herself’ is superfluous.

‘He thought to himself, poor Louise’ (p17). Also on p53...

AFTER THE ACT - Book review

 

Winston Graham’s suspense novel After the Act was published in 1965.

Playwright Morris Scott has been married for seven years to Harriet, a rich older woman, his muse, who suffers from ill health. Over those years she supported and encouraged him: ‘You ought to be relentless, Morris. Relentless to writing it down. Once the bones are there you can drape them and undrape them at will’ (p63) And now he is successful and planning for one of his plays to appear in Paris.

It had not been planned. ‘I was a man going to meet a girl, surrounded only by the anticipation, tautened like a bow-string with pleasure’ (p17). Inevitably, he has an affair with Alexandra Wilshere, a secretary to a rich couple in France. Passion, obsession... ‘We walked on the quay and walked together through the little town, which was murmurous with people. Cars probed the narrow streets like medical isotopes in a bloodstream...’ (p67)

A budding writer could learn from some of Morris’s observations:

‘Half of writing is gestation’ (p26).

‘You have to be tough to reach the top in any profession these days. Stamina’s an essential part of genius, whether you’re a four-minute miler or a composer of symphonies’ (p27).

‘How easy it is for a writer to lie, the inventions spring to his lips’ (p47).

The suspense deepens when Harriet falls to her death from a Paris hotel balcony. Was it an accident, or murder, or carelessness? ‘We all make mistakes; the error is in trying to hide them’ (p197). That phrase could well be the epitaph of many a politician’s career! The fact is that now Morris is free to wed Alexandra. If his conscience will permit it. ‘To be honest around a central lie is like building a house with the foundations unlevel’ (p135).

Graham the craftsman has delved into life, death and guilt. ‘The sun set. Dusk crept in like the beginning of death’ (p191).

Editorial note:

‘a passionate unsophisticated fumbling in the dark... among the heather and the bickering cicadas’ (p75). Long ago I was corrected: cicadas make their noise in the hot day, crickets make their noise at night, and this seems borne out by my time in Spain.

THE WORLD IS MADE OF GLASS - Book review - ADULT CONTENT

 

Morris West’s novel The World is Made of Glass was published in 1983. I was studying psychology in the early 1980s (Open University) and bought this since it was a fictional account of one of Carl Gustav Jung’s case histories. I’ve only now got round to reading it!

West was inspired by a very brief and incomplete record of a case in Jung’s autobiographical work Memories, Dreams , Reflections. As West states in his Note: ‘every novelist is a myth-maker. He quotes Jung: ‘I can only make direct statements, only “tell stories”, whether or not the stories are “true” is not the problem. The only question is whether what I tell is my fable, my truth”.’ [Maybe Meghan Markle has read this…!]

The story is told from two viewpoints: Magda Liliane Kardross von Gamsfeld, a beautiful, rich and intelligent woman of dubious morals, and Jung, her psychiatrist.

Jung is married to Emma who is thirty at this time and carrying their fifth child. Jung met her when she was sixteen and wanted to marry her. ‘I loved her then; I love her now; but love is a chameleon word and we humans change colour more quickly than the words we speak’ (p70). These guilt-ridden thoughts relate to his attractive assistant, Antonia Wolff (Toni), who happens to be his mistress.

One of Jung’s beliefs was that synchronicity has psychic foundations. ‘… coincidence, synchronicity, things happening at the same moment in time, without causal connection, but still closely related in nature… in the context of psychic experience’ (p90).

Jung is aware that what he practices is not scientific, ‘Because this sciences of ours, this medicine of the mind, is still in its infancy. The methods are tentative. The procedures are incomplete’ (p127). He’s quite honest with himself some of the time: ‘I lie, too, when it serves my purposes; but then we all lie in one fashion or another because we are not scientists always; we are soothsayers – dealing with arcane symbols and the stuff of dreams’ (p104). ‘My real exploration will be in the undiscovered country of the mind’ (p154).

At this time, 1913, Jung and Freud were at loggerheads and quarrelled professionally, notoriously. It is also when Jung was approaching the beginning of a protracted breakdown. ‘I’m like a leaf tossed in the wind. So, I have no choice but to let myself be swept along by these storms of the subconscious and see where, finally, they drive me’ (p127).

Most of the book is reported speech, either Magda or Jung reminiscing on their troubled past: Jung was raped as a young boy by a family friend; Magda was initiated into sex at an early age, notably incestuously with her father.

There is a battle of wills between the pair – and collateral damage is felt by both Emma and Toni. Symbolism of dreams is paramount to much of Jung’s exploration. Gradually, he learns about a terrible truth that Magda had concealed. This Magda is a figment of West’s imagination and conveyed with great empathy and skill. Inevitably, there are revelations of a sexual nature and sexual obsession and also murder and guilt.

The author’s ability to get into the minds of two disparate yet complementary individuals is a remarkable feat.

West first wrote a play about this relationship, and then followed it with this novel.

The book title is from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays: ‘Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass. Some damning circumstance always transpires.’

Writing anatomy lesson – ‘the same scenes kept replaying’

This chapter is designed to highlight the plight of the victim. The public’s perception of the justice system is that it doesn’t care about the victims. Criminals without remorse don’t care, that’s certain. My final excerpt is from Chapter 3. 

Mr. Terry Pryce, 19, charged with manslaughter, was acquitted today. Mrs. Michelle Boynton, 38, the widow of the man Pryce was accused of killing, broke down when she heard the verdict.

Last June Mr. Geoff Boynton, 42, objected to Pryce damaging his garden fence with a screwdriver. Pryce allegedly became abusive and stabbed Mr. Boynton in the chest five times. Mrs. Boynton beat off Pryce with a garden rake and later identified him.

After today’s verdict, Mrs. Boynton’s solicitor stated that they would “consider a civil action or other alternatives to get justice”.

 – The Alverbank Chronicle

Michelle Boynton sat in front of the gas fire, watching with unseeing eyes the antics of the characters in Coronation Street. They’d always preferred the northern soap to the gloom and doom of Eastenders. She could hear Geoff’s deep laughter echoing, it seemed, from his empty chair. The clock ticked reassuringly on the mantelpiece. Even after all this time, the same scenes kept replaying in her mind; stark, frightening, yet unreal. And also the might-have-beens, the alternatives if only Geoff hadn’t felt protective towards his property, their home. Guilt stabbed her in the heart, as it often did when she woke in the early hours of the morning.

In the blue light from the television set, her plain features appeared attractive, the high cheekbones pronounced with shadows, her big eyes glistening, reflecting the red of the fire. But there was nobody to see her. The curtains were drawn, and there was no one to caress her curling, shoulder-length red hair.

Tears rolled over her cheeks, but she didn’t notice them. Before that terrible day in June, when life was normal, she had been amused by the soap opera, her thick lips broadening into a laugh. But the nights were no longer normal. They probably never would be, ever again.

Michelle’s stomach rumbled emptily. Apart from toast at breakfast, she hadn’t eaten all day.

As the advertisements came on, she got up, walked into the kitchen and put on the kettle.

There was a dull ache, deep in her heart, and no Rennies would ease it. She rubbed her chest idly while waiting for the water to boil.

Automatically, she put out two mugs – labelled ‘Geoff’ and ‘Michelle’. She spooned the coffee into both. Only at the point of pouring the water onto the granules did she realise her mistake.

 
Geoff wasn’t coming back. He’d been taken from her, killed by a callous lout who thrust his fist in the air when he was acquitted.

Michelle lowered the kettle and clutched Geoff’s mug to her breast.

 
She was still relatively young, with plenty of life in front of her, yet the years ahead that had offered so much promise now threatened to be empty, sad and bitter.

She sat at the kitchen table and lowered the mug, then covered her face with her hands and wept.

***

Larry Dawson and Frank Ricketts carried the DVD recorder between them, the cable with the plug draped round Larry’s neck. Even devoid of leaves, a broad sycamore tree by the double garden gate still cast deep shadows over them. Nearby was a pile of sand and brick rubble from a half-completed house extension. Frank’s Commer van was parked a few yards further down the Crescent.

“Have we got time to go back, d’you reckon?” whispered Frank, his breath visible in the night air.

“Nah, I did a quick check and there ain’t nothin’ else worth pinchin’.” Larry was older and thicker set than eighteen-year-old Frank, and liked to bathe in the youth’s adulation. “Stick to what you know you can get rid of, Frankie.”

Suddenly a black shape emerged from behind the tree, grabbed the wire round Larry’s neck and twisted and tightened it. “I think you should put that machine back, don’t you?” said the stranger.

 
Larry instinctively let go of the DVD recorder at once, trying to reach his assailant behind him.

Frank fumbled and let go of the machine, and barked, “Hey! Who the–?”

 
The recorder, only suspended on the wire round Larry’s neck, slammed into his thighs and groin. A gloved hand wrenched Larry’s face round and rammed it twice into the bole of the tree. Nose streaming blood, his breathing cut short by the wire, he collapsed at the tree’s base.

Frank faltered and his face went pale. He turned and dashed towards the van.

Their assailant released a bolas from a waist fastening, twirled it overhead then let go.

The weighted sections of rope flew after Frank and wrapped around his legs, tripping him up.

“Christ!” Frank fell headfirst into the gutter. As he struggled to unravel the rope, his attacker ran up. Heart hammering, pounding, all Frank could see was the whites of eyes in the black-mask of a face. The punch when it came was surprisingly swift and knocked him senseless.

Their van contained a phone – all the mod cons at their victims’ expense. The stranger in black called the police, gave the address of the break-in, and hung up.

Their assailant then emptied some sand into the van’s oil-sump and quickly melted into the darkness.

A short while later, the police patrol found Frank and Larry tied to the tree. Labels from a hand-held printer were stuck to a pre-printed card and pinned to Larry’s chest: These two men burgled 4 Waterside Crescent. The DVD recorder has their fingerprints on it. Handle with care. The Black Knight. In the bottom corner of the card was a black silhouette of a knight with a shield and sword.

***

As this is a crime novel, it seems likely that certain individuals will swear. I rationed the strong swearing to four instances.

I’ve deliberately not referred to the vigilante as either ‘he’ or ‘she’ at this stage, which presents its own minor problems in description, since I want the scene to be visual to the reader. [When an author writes about an individual whose identity is a secret and it’s daylight without shadows, I wonder how they’d film that. The actor’s face would be visible – unless it was always a back view…]

***

 

Sudden Vengeance published by Crooked Cat website here

 

SUDDEN VENGEANCE purchased from

 

Amazon UK here

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Saturday Story - 'Remorseless Time'

REMORSELESS TIME

Nik Morton

 

‘Why do you go back?’ the very thin and pallid temporal engineer asked, the last in a long litany of familiar questions. One of these days, he might get a different answer from me. But not this time.

            ‘I want to suffer contrition,’ I said, as usual, ‘but can’t.’

            Sitting opposite, the NB judge leaned back and sighed. ‘You can’t change the past, Mr Thurston.’ The judiciary had dispensed with wigs fifty years ago. He looked like a kindly uncle rather than a hanging judge. Not that they hung anybody in New Britain. In a way, indoctrination was much worse. Death was final. Indoctrination seemed like a living death to free spirits like Donna, Tim and me.

‘You know the law, Mr Thurston. You have to live with what you have done. Be suitably contrite and then we can all move on.’

            ‘I need to go back, your honour,’ I insisted, ‘it’s my just punishment, after all.’

            ‘Very well, then.’ He cleared his throat and rubber-stamped the authorisation. It may be the twenty-second century, but some in authority still relished the old-fashioned methods. He handed the authority to my attractive probation officer sitting beside me.

‘Stuart, you’re booked for Tuesday week,’ she said with an insipid smile. ‘At 2.55am.’

            I turned back to the judge. ‘Thank you, your honour.’

            His face twisted in a half-hearted scowl. ‘On your return, I trust you will show more remorse.’ He didn’t care, I could tell. As long as he got paid handsomely with a protected pension fifteen years earlier than the taxpayers who financed his position, he didn’t need to care.

            I nodded and said, ‘I will definitely try to show remorse, your honour, next time.’ But I doubt it, I thought, but didn’t say.

 *

Behaviour control started last century with the street corner cameras and the legions of government funded organisations sustaining the monolith of intrusive government. Individuality was frowned upon for thirty years until the Tinkering Triumvirate, as we called it, kicked in - drugs were introduced into cigarettes and alcohol and subliminal messages were sent out through television, primarily during those boring unscripted reality shows and the plethora of soaps.

All of a sudden, individuality stood out and was deemed dangerous.

            By this time Donna, my brother Tim and I and thousands like us, who preferred reading to watching drivel on TV, had cottoned on to what was happening and went teetotal and underground. Literally.

            We’d been quite successful, disrupting the transport of drugs to the water-treatment plants and a few carefully sited explosions shunted several television channels off-air for days at a time.

These so-called public disorder interruptions threw up quite a number of people who suffered withdrawal symptoms which were characterised by discovering the invasive real world. Some committed suicide, others rushed to find an alternative fix, while many joined our rebellious ranks.

 

Wikipedia commons

 *

We rebels were free to think and free to love. Unfortunately, on the very morning that our underground outpost was under attack from government troops, I found my wife Donna in bed with my brother Tim. A red mist descended over me and the next thing I knew, they were both dead at my feet. The smoking revolver was on the floor.

            I was devastated and sank to my knees, which is how the government troops found me.

            I was arrested and charged with rebellion against the state as well as the lesser offences of murdering Tim and Donna. I pleaded guilty, as my good counsel advised.

While we’d been fighting our little skirmishes against the government brain-washing system, they’d moved on.

Wrongdoers were adjured to visit their past crimes – literally – and repent of their sins. Yes, the religious bigots had taken the reins, ousting the accountants who’d made a mess of things.

            When the boffins had discovered time travel, the state was in a position to commandeer the plans. Clearly, certain strata of society were protected against NB indoctrination – the scientists and the ruling elite. As engineering was moribund in the country, no private businesses could afford the time machine’s funding.

Time-travellers were incapable of interacting with the past or its people; they were merely observers. The theory goes, if you see what you did often enough, you’ll be contrite and ask for forgiveness. Only the state can forgive.

            This time, though, the judge had permitted me to arrive at the scene five minutes early. I’d pleaded that if I understood what was being said before I entered the bedroom, I might be better placed to comprehend what happened.

So I arrived at the bedroom door, dressed as I had been on the day. The lights were out. I slipped into the shadows to the left of the door.

            Donna was saying, ‘I’m his wife, I shouldn’t be doing this!’

            ‘Hey, I feel like hell, too. But you fancy me and I fancy you. So let’s do it.’

            She shook her head and then she saw me in the shadows and gasped. ‘Tim, it’s Stuart, he’s here!’ Her eyes screwed up tight.

            True to her words, I watched myself arrive at that moment at the bedroom door and discover them in bed together.

            Like all the other times, my face drained of colour and I simply stared. Not once had I seen myself move from the doorway, not once had I seen myself kill the two people I’d loved most in the world.

            At that same instant, the sirens sounded. ‘Government troops have infiltrated the bunker!’ The tannoy announcement echoed in the room.

Tim swore and fumbled under the pillow, pulling out the revolver.

I could see it in Donna’s eyes, she thought Tim was going to shoot me when I knew he was probably just getting ready to fight off government intruders.

            The gun went off accidentally and Donna fell back. Shocked and appalled, Tim flung the weapon away and it went off again, the bullet hitting him in the chest. The revolver landed at my feet.

I keep going back, but it’s always the same. How can I show contrition? I didn’t kill them; it was an accident. But the judge would never believe me.

So I keep going back – just to see them.

 

Both images of surveillance camera - Wikipedia commons

***

Previously published in Telling Tales #4 – Winter, 2009.

Copyright Nik Morton, 2009, 2014

 

If you’d like to read more of my short stories, many prize-winners, please check out When the Flowers Are in Bloom – Amazon.com e-book here and Amazon.co.uk e-book here – paperbacks are also available.

Or try my Leon Cazador collection, 22 cases of a half-English, half-Spanish private eye, Spanish Eye from Crooked Cat Publishing - Amazon.com e-book here and Amazon.co.uk e-book here – paperbacks are also available.